OCZ's highly anticipated new high-end SSD is targeted at enthusiasts and the enterprise market

OCZ Technology has become a major player in the enthusiast storage market, thanks to their strong Solid State Drive portfolio. The company has been very successful with its Vertex series of SSDs, but strong demand has kept prices high. Competitors like Super Talent have also begun to use the same NAND flash controllers from Indilinx, leading to shortages.

In response, OCZ has been looking for a second source for high-end NAND flash controllers. Samsung is a major supplier of NAND flash memory to OCZ, and has been seeking to broaden its product line by selling NAND controllers and DRAM cache as well. Samsung previously confirmed to DailyTech that they currently have no plans to sell their own PB22-J SSDs to the channel, preferring to sell them to OEMs instead.

OCZ's new Summit series of SSDs use the same S3C29RBB01 controller as found in the Samsung PB22-J. All models will come with a 128MB DRAM cache, doubling that of the Vertex series. The 250GB and 120GB models have a maximum read speed of 220MB/s and a maximum write speeds of 200MB/s. However, sustained writes can achieve 200MB/s; double that of the Vertex series using MLC chips. The 60GB model has the same read speed, but only 125MB/s max write. Random read and write speeds were not available.

The company will compete against Intel in the enterprise market with the Summit series and the new Vertex EX series, which uses faster SLC memory. Retail availability of the Summit series is expected later this week. Pricing information has not yet been disclosed.

OCZ, however, is not the first partner to use Samsung's new controller. Corsair launched and shipped its P256 drive last week. It uses the same S3C29RBB01 NAND controller, but has different firmware.

"Intel is investing heavily (think gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man hours) in resources to create an Intel host controllers spec in order to speed time to market of the USB 3.0 technology." -- Intel blogger Nick Knupffer